ADAPTIVENESS AND PURPOSIVENESS ;34;i 



posiveness have played an important part, and that even 

 when it may be said that variability shuffles the cards blindly, 

 it is incumbent on the individual to play the game intelli- 

 gently if it means to win. 



Moreover, in the regulatory self-adjustment of the or- 

 ganism when functioning or development has been badly 

 disturbed, in the activity, within the body, of independent 

 mobile elements like phagocytes, in the regeneration of a 

 lost lens from a tissue which does not normally give rise to 

 one, we get just a glimpse of a residual organic purposiveness, 

 though that has been as a whole resigned in favour of very 

 perfect and thoroughgoing organisation. 



What is meant by saying that the organism is essentially 

 purposive, or that it has an essentially teleological or finalist 

 aspect? This is meant, that the whole life expresses a ten- 

 dency to persist, that the whole life is adapted towards self- 

 preservation and self-expression. And if it be said that 

 this adaptedness is the outcome of ages of mechanical varia- 

 tion and selection, the answer is that neither variation nor 

 selection can be adequately described as mechanical. 



§ 7. Provisional Conclusion and Anticipation. 



We have been necessarily much concerned with the out- 

 works, and there remain many imperfectly answered ques- 

 tions. What, in the world-becoming as a whole, is the signi- 

 ficance in the largest sense of the inorganic domain in its in- 

 tricacy and splendour, of the myriads of invisible Protists, of 

 the hundreds of thousands of plants, of the struggle for exist- 

 ence, of the prodigious mortality, of the age-long genetic proc- 

 ess with all its groaning and travailing? To such questions 

 we shall return in our study of Organic Evolution, conscious 

 that behind them there loom others — If Nature be Nature 



